Is The Christophers a true story? Where Ian McKellen's painter came from

Ian McKellen plays a London painter whose unfinished canvases are worth considerably more than he is. It has the shape of something that happened to a real person.

It didn't. The Christophers — directed by Steven Soderbergh, written by Ed Solomon, premiered at Toronto on 7 September 2025, released by Neon in the US on 10 April 2026 and by Picturehouse in the UK on 15 May 2026 — is invented from scratch. Julian Sklar never existed, nor did his abandoned portrait series, nor the authentication headache the plot builds out of it. What's real is the scaffolding underneath: the mentors, the consultants, and 16 paintings knocked out in a week by a man who used to paint the portraits in Harry Potter.

Where Julian Sklar actually came from

Solomon has been direct about the source. The project began as a conversation rather than a pitch — Soderbergh floated a chamber piece about two artists, one old and one young, with a heist mechanism borrowed from Patricia Highsmith. Solomon supplied the emotional engine from his own life.

"I'd been wanting to write about my own personal relationship with several different mentor figures in my life, several of whom had given up. It was heartbreaking when they gave up — and they often did so because the public had turned against them," Solomon told Letterboxd Journal in 2026.

The pair wrote it on spec, with no studio attached, and shaped the two leads for McKellen and Coel before either actor had been approached. Shooting took place in Fitzrovia in February 2025.

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The people they actually asked

Rather than research a famous forger, Solomon interviewed working art-world figures and built Sklar from the composite:

• Jann Haworth — the pop artist who co-created the Sgt. Pepper's cover, consulted during development.
• Derek Boshier — a first-wave British pop painter of the 1960s, the generation Sklar would have come up alongside.
• George Lionel Barker — a London gallerist, on how the trade actually handles inventory and estates.
• Lisa Rosen — a restorer, on the practical side of Lori's job.
• Solomon's mother — a painter, and the reason he knew what a stalled career looks like from inside a house.

David Hockney's approach to portraiture fed into the character as well, per The Art Newspaper's review.

Who painted the paintings

Barnaby Gorton, a scenic artist whose credits include portraits for the Harry Potter films, made every canvas, working with production designer Antonia Lowe off mood boards built around Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. The unfinished Sklars came first and came fast.

"We did them in a week. That's great, when you're working at speed, because you don't get caught up in the detail," Gorton told Little White Lies in 2026.

The second batch — the finished versions — went in the opposite direction, because Soderbergh wanted them wilder: shredded canvas, glue, feathers, bedazzling, pop art through abstract expressionism and out the other side.

The one real scandal hiding in it

The film does nod at an actual incident: the 2012 restoration of Elías García Martínez's Ecce Homo fresco in Borja, Spain, by an 81-year-old parishioner named Cecilia Giménez. The result was nicknamed Monkey Christ, went round the world, and has since drawn well over 200,000 visitors to a town that previously had none. An amateur destroyed a minor fresco and accidentally made it famous — which is roughly the argument the film is having with itself for 100 minutes.

For the record: The Christophers took £355,716 in its opening UK weekend, £397,241 including previews — the biggest opening Picturehouse Entertainment has ever had, beating The Wife from 2018. A film about a painter who can't sell anything became its distributor's best-ever debut.

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